|
Manual/Quick Start Guide (8)
The Canon Pixma MX850 comes with a 188-page quick start guide, a decrease of 34 pages from the previous MX830 model. The guide is fairly easy to follow. It’s divided up by tasks: copying, printing, scanning, faxing and other troubleshooting and information. Also included is an on-screen manual that is more engaging with more detailed and color graphics. Essentially, the information is the same. The on-screen manual can be reached through the "get help on your canon product or software" bar from the Solution Menu, which will be discussed later in the Driver and Administration section.
Out of the box (6)
The package comes with the printer itself, document kit, setup instructions, Leopard information sheet (for Apple users with the latest version of MacOS), network setup guide, quick start guide, software setup and user’s guide CD-ROM, ink tanks, PGI-5 (black), CLI-8 (black, cyan, magenta, yellow), power cord, print head, bundled media (MP-101 A4 - 4 sheets), sample media (PP-201 4x6 – 5 sheets), and a telephone line cable. There's also a cross sell sheet that attempts to sell you accessories related to the printer.
Setup (7)
Setting up the printer was hardly a difficult task. Despite the protective wrapping, the printer came out fairly painlessly. Unpacking the printer shouldn’t take any more than ten minutes, including the time it takes to plug it in and wire it up.
The two areas of setup involved in this printer are placing the ink cartridge and print head into place and alignment. Putting the ink cartridges into place can be an exciting task. With the print head in place, the cartridges are placed into their clearly marked designated spaces. When they’re properly in place, a red light turns on. Alignment involves putting the included MP-101 paper into the printer and running the alignment sequence.
Whether choosing to setup using easy install or custom install for the MX850, setup is straightforward. With a few clicks, for both custom and easy install, the driver and software are downloaded and ready for use. This process takes about fifteen minutes.
Drivers and Administration (7.5)
Drivers and software are available for Windows Vista, Windows XP, Windows 2000, Windows Me, Windows 98 and Mac OS X. The Solution Menu is the one forthcoming portal into the MX850 printer controls and editing tools.
It is separated into six categories: scan/import photos or documents, print photos or albums, change settings or find solutions to problems, get help on your Canon product or software, register (the printer) online, and find information on Canon products.
The Solution Menu manages virtually any Canon printer you may have installed your computer. When using the get help option, the Solution Menu recognizes other Canon printers and gives you the option to choose which printer you want help for.
When choosing the MX850 under the get help option, the menu will redirect you to the Canon MX850 on-screen manual.
The change settings bar lets you choose which printer you want to edit settings for and/or need assistance with. This gives you four options to explore: printer settings, paper source settings, printer status and troubleshooting.
The printer settings option connects you to the MX840 printer properties where several editing and enhancing options are available. The Main and Page Setup tabs contain the usual standard editing tools, however, the following tabs, Effects and Maintenance add some new options.
With the Effects tab, the settings for vividness, noise and image optimization can be controlled, as well as a settings to simulate illustration and turning monochrome images into pseudo-color ones with the addition of a color cast. However useful, these options aren’t anything extraordinary; they could be done with any other photo or document editing tool, and probably more effectively.
The Maintenance tab provides maintenance features such as power, cleaning and alignment; the printer status can be checked here, and by clicking on custom settings, you can chose the ink drying time by toggling between short and long dry time.
There’s also a Profiles tab in between Effects and Maintenance. The list of profiles is laid out on the left side and the settings on the right. Preferred settings can be added to Printing Profiles for easier and faster access of those settings. New additions can be added as default settings as well.
An interesting feature through the My Printer portal is the Paper Source Settings option. This window lets you chose how you’d like to use your trays.
Paper Source Settings gives you three options on how to use the two main input trays. The first option refers to the most frequently used paper. With this option, you can choose the front tray for the most commonly used paper type and the rear tray for lesser used paper types. So, if you print a lot of draft documents on plain paper and use nicer paper for the final version, this option would be beneficial as you can allocate a paper type for each of the trays. This would also be useful if you commonly print documents and occasionally print photographs; you can set plain paper to feed from the main cassette and photo paper from the back tray.
The second option entails using the same type of paper in both trays: when one tray runs out of paper, the printer will automatically switch to the other . This is a good option for those who print a lot of long documents, as it increases the paper capacity to 300 sheets of plain paper.
The last option allows you to control the tray selection manually using the Feed Switch button on the printer itself. The user can decide at each print request to keep the selected tray or switch it. Using this option, the tray selection can only be changed from the printer control panel, requiring you to be within reach of the printer.
Printer Status is third on the list. Here is where you’ll find the printer status, whether it’s online or not and the ink levels. The driver already does a good job of letting you know where the ink levels are at each print request, but being able to look it up as well is a definite plus.
The final option is troubleshooting.
The troubleshooting window helps with simple problems you may have like how to cancel a print, what to do when having ink problems, cleaning, what to do when the printer lamp is flashing and when the printer won’t start. It also has a link to view the on-screen user manual.
The Troubleshooting window won't help if you are having serious technical difficulties with the printer, but it's a good handy guide to basic operations and simple problems. However the link at the very bottom right corner is the Additional support information, which leads to the Canon website for additional support for troubleshooting printer issues.
Software (7)
The Solution Menu leads you to two of the four software programs included with the Canon MX850: MP Navigator EX, and Easy-PhotoPrint EX. The other two are Newsoft Presto PageManager and ScanSoft OmniPage SE. MP Navigator EX is software for scanning and/or importing documents or images. The three categories it provides are Scan/Import, View & Use and One-Click.
The Scan/Import section provides three additional choices of execution: Photos/Documents (Platen), Stack of documents (ADF) and Memory card. These are the three avenues given to the user to upload paper documents or images onto their computers. The first option is for a few documents that can be placed one by one on the scanner bed. The second option, Stack of Documents, is so users can import using the ADF (Automatic Document Feeder). And the third option is transferring files from a memory card. One issue here is the scan resolution; although Canon claims that the MX850 is capable of scanning at up to 4800 dots per inch (dpi), the software is limited to a maximum of 600 dpi, even when you ask to scan a photo on the platen.
Users can click on any one of the three options and be able to change their mind. The new window keeps all three options available.
Each task is worked out into three steps: placing documents into place, selecting the paper type and executing the command.
MP Navigator EX preferences can be changed by clicking the Preferences link on the top right hand corner. This leads to a window with a general tab and a scanner button settings tab, of which the later is most useful. The scanner button settings tab lets users select the document type, size, resolution, and whether users want their scans to automatically saved to their computer or not. If users choose to automatically save, there are options to name the files, select a type, and the placement of where the scans are stored.
The second category, View & Use, also has three options to work with: My Box, Specify Folder and Recently Saved Images.
My Box holds scanned and imported images. By default it’s organized by date of scan; starting out with a year folder, then a month folder then a folder with the exact date of scanned items.
Like the Scan/Import window, it keeps the other options available in the window no matter which option the user chooses.
Specify Folder is an option where the user can chose the folder they want to view in the MP Navigator EX window. Users can view recently scanned images and search saved images through this navigation window as well,
The One-Click category makes it possible for users to scan and save documents with a single click. There are five options given: save to PC, save as PDF file, attach to e-mail, OCR and custom.
From the Solution Menu, Easy-PhotoPrint EX can be accessed by clicking on the print photos or albums bar. The Easy-PhotoPrint EX provides six options: PhotoPrint, Album, Calendar, Stickers, Layout Print and Library. Each option is self-explanatory. Users chose photos, create the layout they want and print it.
Scansoft OmniPage SE 4.0 is software for manipulating and converting scanned documents from images to text. When installed and connected to the scanner through Scanner Setup Wizard. OmniPage operates using three key working areas: Document Manager, Text Editor and Image Panel.
|
